Michelle de Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize for Theory & Practice, her genre-busting seventh novel

Australia Broadcast Center

23-05-2025

Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most decorated authors, has won the 2025 Stella Prize, worth $60,000, for her novel Theory & Practice.
It's a case of third time lucky for the Sri Lankan-born author, who has been twice shortlisted for the Stella, a literary award for women and non-binary writers established in 2013. (That year, Questions of Travel was shortlisted and The Life to Come followed in 2018. Both novels went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award).
Theory & Practice follows an unnamed narrator in her 20s studying for a postgraduate degree and living a bohemian life in grungy St Kilda.
Much conjecture has been made regarding just how autobiographical the novel is. Is it memoir? Is it autofiction? And does the distinction matter?
De Kretser doesn't think so. "It doesn't seem to me like the most interesting question you could ask about the book," she tells ABC Arts.
But the fact that the novel has left readers guessing what is fact and what is fiction is a testament to its success.
"I succeeded in doing what I set out to do, which is to write a novel that doesn't read like a novel; that reads like fact, like life captured on the wing," de Kretser says.
The novel opens with what turns out to be a fragment of what de Kretser calls "conventional fiction": a young Australian geologist, travelling in Switzerland in 1957, daydreams about a beguiling music teacher he met in London.
But then, on page 12, the narrator suddenly intercedes in the story: "At that point, the novel I was writing stalled."
What follows reads like a memoir as de Kretser uses forms associated with non-fiction, such as letters, diaristic prose and essays, to create the sense of verisimilitude.
The candid authorial voice written in the first person makes it easy to forget that Theory & Practice is a work of fiction — and that was the point.
"I was drawing all the time on the techniques of non-fiction to write fiction. I think that is something that isn't done very often," de Kretser says.
"It was deliberate, to make people think this is truth; this is reality. Of course, anyone who knows me knows that my life is different from the life that's described in [the novel]. But of course, most readers don't know me."
Through the narrator, de Kretser signposts her intention early on:
"I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth."
Adding to the illusion of realism is the cover, which features a photo of de Kretser, taken in 1986, above the words, "The new novel".
"I think this is very clever of the designer [WH Chong] because what that is saying is, 'Here is a photo of a real person, but it's only a representation of reality,'" she says.
De Kretser likens the effect to that of René Magritte's famous 1929 painting of a pipe titled The Treachery of Images, also known as This Is Not a Pipe.
"[The message is] the representation of reality in art is not reality," de Kretser says. "It mimics it."
Given her reading list at the start of the semester, the narrator discovers in her time away from study "French post-structuralist theory — Theory — had conquered the humanities".
Suddenly, she had to read "texts" (not books) in a completely new way. "Theory … posited that meaning was unstable and endlessly deferred."
De Kretser has drawn on her own experience in 80s academia.
"Being at Melbourne Uni in the 1980s, where capital-T post-structuralist Theory absolutely ruled the roost, at least in the English department, I was interested in how one applied theory to literary practice," de Kretser told ABC Radio National's The Book Show.
The novel explores the "messy gap" between the two in many facets of life, as it relates to Israeli military strategy or university social dynamics.
But it's a tension that plays out most dramatically in the narrator's romantic life.
As a feminist, she believes she shouldn't feel emotions like anger and jealousy towards other women.
But when her ex leaves her for the "smart, good-looking, outspoken" Lois, her rage is directed towards the woman rather than her ex.
Later, when she embarks on an affair with an engineering student named Kit, she feels only a mix of triumph and scorn when she thinks about his girlfriend Olivia, highlighting the gulf between the idealism of feminist solidarity and the messiness of real-life relationships.
De Kretser says these kinds of conflicted feelings are fertile ground for fiction.
"It reveals the gap between [the narrator's] values and her ideals — she's a feminist — and her practice: what's going on in her life, where she constructs the other woman … as a rival and is jealous of her.
"It makes her a multifaceted, complex character and speaks to the novel's theme of theory and practice."
Theory & Practice is also in conversation with the late fiction of Virginia Woolf, whom de Kretser describes as a "towering" literary figure.
"She did adventurous things with form, but she also theorised women's lives, famously in A Room of One's Own," she says. "And then she lived a very unconventional life herself [as] part of the Bloomsbury set."
The narrator of Theory & Practice is writing her thesis on Woolf's 1937 novel, The Years.
"In her original idea for that novel, Woolf intended to write a fictional chapter followed by an essay, fictional chapter followed by an essay [and so on]," de Kretser says.
"She wrote about 100,000 words along those lines and then abandoned it. I don't exactly know why, but I'm guessing it was just too schematic for Woolf.
"But I liked that idea; I thought, 'OK, that's something I could take up.' I didn't like the very rigid structure of fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction; I thought you could mix that up a bit."
Taking her cue from Woolf, de Kretser settled on a hybrid form that blends fiction, essay and memoir.
But while Theory & Practice offers a homage to Woolf, it's also a critique.
The novel shows Woolf as a flawed figure. Reading Woolf's diaries, the narrator comes across a 1917 entry describing EW Perera, a leading member of the Sri Lankan independence movement, as a "poor little mahogany-coloured wretch".
It's a moment of intense disappointment for the narrator, who views the modernist writer as a sort of maternal figure: her "Woolfmother".
De Kretser says she wanted to explore our relationships with figures we admire, such as Woolf, who don't live up to our expectations.
"How do we deal with that?" she asks.
"Woolf, a brilliant theorist of women's lives, seeing how women under patriarchy are oppressed, simply could not extend that view to thinking about how colonial people were oppressed, for instance, even though she was married to a man who had served in the empire and was an anti-imperialist.
Stella CEO Fiona Sweet describes de Kretser's winning novel as "another example of the depth of her talent as a writer".
In their report, the 2025 Stella Prize judges described it as "a brilliantly auto fictive knot, composed of the shifting intensities and treacheries of young love, of complex inheritances both literary and maternal, of overwhelming jealousies and dark shivers of shame".
In 2025, the Stella Prize received more than 180 entries. It was the first year the Stella shortlist featured books exclusively by women of colour.
De Kretser says she's thrilled to have finally won the prize.